Message from the Chair

Happy Fall! I hope all of you had a great summer and are energized for the start of the academic year. A special welcome to all of our new students, staff and faculty who are joining our DEB family.

In June we announced the winners of our DEB 2018 Good Ideas Contest. If you missed the contest, you can find details of the proposals here https://open-proposals.ucsf.edu/deb/ideas-2018. Congratulations to our winners whose ideas will form the basis for some of our departmental investments in this upcoming year.

Trainee Award: Anusha Vable

Staff Award: Susan Rubin

Junior Faculty Award: Erin Van Blarigan

Faculty Award: John Witte, Margaret Handley, and Lydia Zablotska

Honorable Mentions to Jeff Martin for the most proposals and to Maria Glymour for reminding us of the importance of functional dry erase markers and canceled meetings.

The Good Ideas Contest is just one of the many ways we are working to advance our five DEB Strategic Priority Areas:

Faculty and Staff Development

Communication and Cohesion

Strategic Partnerships

Integration of our Educational Programs

One Big Idea

Several workgroups have been actively engaged in these areas, and I appreciate the engagement of faculty, staff and students who have devoted their time to these efforts.

How our department is organized can help facilitate the advancement of our scholarship and educational missions, the development of our faculty, and our departmental cohesion. Over the next few months we will be re-evaluating our DEB division structure and approach to departmental leadership to assure we are organized in the best way to achieve our goals. This area will be the focus of a departmental retreat and upcoming ALL DEB and DEB Faculty Meetings. You should have received information about how to provide input into this important process, and I welcome your thoughts.

Wishing you all the best for an excellent start to the academic year!

Kirsten

HONORS & NEWS

Maria Glymour is a social media star. Her LinkedIn post, “Epidemiology and why I love it,” has 422 likes on LinkedIn, more than 500 likes and about 250 retweets on Twitter.

Meyeon Park, MD, MAS and Rebecca Graff, PhD will lead a one-month intensive course for 3rd year medical students, in March 2019, entitled Designing and Conducting Research. The course is derived from the DEB long-standing, successful “Designing Clinical Research” series.

The department welcomes four new faculty members, who joined over the summer or will be joining shortly: Patience Afulani, assistant professor, Brittany Chambers, assistant professor, Kim Rhoads, director of the Office of Community Outreach in the Diller Family Cancer Center, and Catherine Oldenburg, secondary faculty based at the Proctor Foundation. Read more about them on our website.

More News:

Service milestones: Congratulations to the following people who achieved significant service milestones in 2017. On Friday, August 10, 2018, the campus held a celebration event recognizing employees who had reached 10 years of service or more in 2017! They included:

25 years of service: Binh Dam and Chris Gehrman

20 years of service: Alaric Battle and Myrna Diaz

15 years of service: Jason Maeda

Please welcome new employees who have joined the department since July 1: